Leyla Keough-Hameed

Dr. Leyla Keough-Hameed provides leadership in the creation, implementation, and evaluation of faculty development programs, focusing especially on early faculty, mutual mentoring, community building and DEI, and strategic planning to facilitate faculty professional growth and well-being.  

Keough-Hameed supports, celebrates, and advocates for our faculty in her role as Director of Faculty Development, but also in other ways. As a non-tenure track faculty member (Lecturer) herself, she serves as a Senator for District 19 in the Faculty Senate and on the Faculty Senate Research Council. She is also a proud member of the Massachusetts Society of Professors (MSP/MTA/NEA), the union representing faculty and librarians at UMass Amherst.  

Keough-Hameed brings to this role a deep understanding of diversity and equity, and extensive experience with evidence-based programming for equity and inclusion in higher education, particularly in research contexts at UMass Amherst. She is an American-born Turkish woman of mixed descent (Turkish and Irish-American) and a cultural anthropologist whose work examines women, labor, and the global economy. Her ethnography, Worker-Mothers at the Margins of Europe: Gender and Migrations between Moldova and Istanbul (Indiana University and Woodrow Wilson Press, 2015) explores the world of undocumented migrant women in Turkey.  

She holds a BA in International Relations (George Washington University, 1994), MA in Social Science (University of Chicago, 1997), and PhD in Anthropology (University of Massachusetts – Amherst 2008). She has taught most recently at UMass Amherst and Hampshire College.